Very slow network...

[Randy Sandberg]

on 3/4/00 8:35 AM, Siva Alagarsamy at siva@sivasys.com wrote:

> I was testing the network with Windows98 on both the computer.
> One is a old 100Mhz Acer Aspire (Cyrix 6x86) and the other is a 500Mhz PIII
> Dell
> Dimension. I was tranfering
> a 30Mb file from the Dell to Acer.
> I changed the connection type to 10BaseT and I could transfer a 33Mb file in
> 20
> seconds...
> At 100Mbs, I couldn't complete the transfer at all. After a minute, I had
> transfered only 100K... This happened
> both in Linux and Windows.... I guess, the Acer computer is slow to handle
> that
> speed and I need to force 10Mbs on both for efficient transfer.
> 
> Siva
> 

Hello Siva,

Note: Please keep this letter going to the mailing list as well. I'm no
expert at this stuff, but there are experts in this group. Therefore, the
more people looking at your problem the better.

And now for something completely different...

Houston, we have a problem. I would try to isolate the problem if I were
you. You might want to try the following:

1. Stick to Linux (i.e., the good OS) and the latest tulip.c driver (i.e.,
Being most relevant to this mailing list). Although, being that the problem
exists in both Windoz as well as Linux it does seem to point some kind of
hardware bug.

2. Eliminate your hub. Buy or make a cross over cable.

3. Make sure both Linux boxes, using the same version of Linux as well as
tulip.c code, are connected at the same rate and mode (e.g., 100Mb/s at
Full-Duplex). You can usually find this out buy doing a:

"dmesg | less" without the quotes and look towards the bottom of the log.

Note: Make sure you're using the latest as well as the most correct tulip.c
code/driver for your Network Interface Cards.

4. After a reboot of both systems transfer your 33MB sized file. By the way,
how are you transferring the data? FTP? Moreover, are you transferring the
data via binary (fast) or ASCII (slow)?

Transfer rates as slow as you are talking about as well as the eventual
timeout(s) spell out some major problem here. Are you sure both cards are
good? My best guess thus far is either some kind of user error... It happens
to the best of us (e.g., wrong driver or wrong driver settings). Or,
possibly a bad NIC... One of the the 100Mb part(s) anyway.

I hope this helps,

Randy

P.S., Just a sanity check here, what brand name/model number NICs are you
using again? Also, cause I'm lazy, which DEC chipset(s) are they using
(e.g., DEC 12143-x).

P.P.S., Sanity check number two. IS YOUR HUB capable of doing both 10 and
100Mb? Are both Linux boxes connecting at either 10Mb/s Half-Duplex or
100Mb/s Half-Duplex? The keyword here being Half-Duplex. Hubs don't do
Full-Duplex ;-)

-- 
Randy Sandberg
Test Engineer
Server Reliability Lab (DeathStarNet)
Apple Computer, Inc.
phone: (408) 974.5749
email: <sandberg@apple.com>
www: <http://deathstarnet.apple.com> - Apple Internal Website

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